Mr André Larnyoh can trace his interest in clothing back to a shy and introverted childhood. “Clothes were a conversation starter without me having to say anything,” he says. “They brought people into me as opposed to me going to them. I was already quite different, so I thought I may as well say it outside with how I look, and then I don’t have to do the awkward thing of going up to someone and starting a conversation.”

As an adult, his clothing takes on another function. “Now it’s just me,” he says. “It still attracts people to me, and that’s fine, but I’m hoping that when I open my mouth there are more interesting things than what I’m wearing.”

There other considerations, too. Larnyoh is in his final year training to be an actor at Lamda, which means his days are unpredictable, to say the least. “Every morning, I have to sprint over to west London and then suddenly I’ll be writhing around on the floor as an animal for my movement class,” he says.

Unsurprisingly, the realities of these rehearsals have impacted Larnyoh’s wardrobe. “I like to feel prepared to do anything in the clothes I wear,” he says. “So, something a bit looser, something durable. I can end up in rehearsal, on the floor, and not be too bummed out about it.”

Larnyoh combines his acting training with writing work that focuses on the fashion industry. The two worlds have put him in a broad spectrum of sartorial situations, and introduced him to a wide range of people, a key source of inspiration for his dressing. “You can always learn something from someone,” he says. “You may not necessarily love their entire look, but you can take one little thing. I’ve taken little bits from everyone I’ve met – well, most people, not everyone.”

A lot of Mr Cedric Bardawil’s clothing choices are dictated by his work. He established his namesake Central London gallery – which shows a mix of emerging and “discovery” artists – in mid 2022, and shoulders almost all of the work himself.

“At the moment, I’m doing several people’s jobs,” he says. “I’m here with the technician, deciding where to hang artworks, then I’m cleaning up – getting down on my hands and knees scrubbing the floors. On the same day, I’ll have collectors in. I do everything from the installation, studio visits, to client meetings, hosting dinners and openings at the gallery.”

This means that Bardawil values versatility in his wardrobe. “I want to be able to wear something that is both hardwearing and smart,” he adds, pointing to good jeans or Oxford shirts, that can be dressed up or down. “I love their versatility, that they can serve several purposes and you can wear them in different contexts and in different ways.”

With such a multi-faceted approach to work, the idea of dressing “appropriately” means something different depending on the day. “If I’m hanging an exhibition, I need to dress practically and I need to be able to not fuss too much about getting dust on my clothes.”

His public-facing role, though, calls for something different entirely. “I see it as symbolic of a special occasion to put on a nice suit. It’s a sign of respect.”

Through his curation of the gallery, his interest in music or his clothing, Bardawil enjoys forging unlikely combinations. “At heart I’m a bit of a historian,” he says. “In the past, I’ve mixed different genres of music together when DJing, and it’s the same with art. That’s what curation is, creating a narrative out of artworks that maybe other people hadn’t put together. I take the same approach to clothes.

“Understanding the history of items has allowed me to put things together in a way that makes sense in my head. Maybe things that seem different suddenly work well together.”

Hearing Mr Ellis Gilbert speak about his work makes him sound like a modern-day renaissance man. As well as frequently collaborating with the director Mr Walid Labri, Gilbert works with cult New York label Aimé Leon Dore on its London operations. Alongside that, he runs his own brand, Soho Yacht Club, which has a charitable focus through its partnership with the Felix Project, an organisation that supplies food to children across London. In other words, Gilbert is a busy man.

The mix of different working environments means that Gilbert has to wear a lot of hats – sometimes literally. “Depending on where I’m going or who I’m going there with, I’ll dress in a certain way,” Gilbert says. “I’m not going to go and do work with Aimé Leon Dore or meet with someone from LVMH in the Nike trackie that I’ll wear to jump on a train and go and meet my boys.”

Gilbert’s wide-ranging work in the fashion industry can, in part, be traced back to a promising career as a young footballer. While playing for youth teams at Tottenham and Brentford, Gilbert became interested in the technical gear he had to wear.

“I remember feeling the difference in the fabrics, small details that you don’t necessarily realise,” he says. “There’s people out there spending hours and hours researching how to make a lighter football boot or a softer jersey. I’ve always found that fascinating. There’s this whole world of design that people don’t realise is there.”

Although it was football that first introduced Gilbert to the more technical side of design, his personal outlook on style is shaped by a whole range of factors. He mentions his dad (“he’s from the Caribbean, and when he was younger, he had to wear shirts, cable knits and stuff like that. It stuck with him”), gangster movies, growing up in Hanwell, west London, and historic subcultures as inspirations.

“I’ve always been interested in other people’s minds,” he says. “Why they saw things a certain way or why it was important for them to express themselves a certain way.”

Mr Jonny Brokenbrow doesn’t really have a choice but to wear hardwearing, durable clothes. In his life and work – which includes being a painter, working as a geography teacher and regular hikes through the countryside – it's important that his clothing is able to withstand whatever he throws at it, which is mainly paint. “I try my best not to get it on things, but it never works,” he concedes. “It’s all the sleeves, I’m always accidentally dipping sleeves in stuff or splattering things on me. I used to do it straight after work, wearing a shirt and tie. But now I’ve got to change.”

Brokenbrow began painting seriously in early 2020, returning to something he’d enjoyed at school but not pursued since. Over the last three-and-a-bit years, he’s developed a style that mixes his sense of humour with two of his passions: hardcore music and the great outdoors.

“It tends to roll organically from the things that I’m really interested in,” Brokenbrow says. “I’ll read a couple of books about a subject and then I’ll drag my wife and my dog to visit a certain place, or I’ll drag my friends to see a certain band, and then it comes out in a painting. Someone once described it as like a one-page zine, like fan art.”

As well as influencing his art, these interests also shape the way Brokenbrow dresses. The subcultures he discovered within hardcore and punk were an early influence on Brokenbrow, and the outlook behind that hasn’t changed. “I like the fact that clothing tells a story about a person, that you can have a narrative of the world you live in through the clothes you wear,” he says.

“Nowadays, my clothes are a reflection of the activities I’m doing, whether that’s hiking or painting or whatever, and there’s a part of me that likes to be able to show the things I’m into through how I dress. I still have that obsessive nature in me that hunts down a certain band T-shirt I’ve been after for ages. But at the moment I’m on the hunt for old English Heritage Stonehenge staff T-shirts. I’ll be trying to hunt them down for months now.”